Tesco Disco: Heavy Electronics II

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Much like pleasure and pain, ambience and noise enjoy a powerful kinship. This dichroic nature of sound allows for such indivisible variants as dark/"black" ambience and atmospheric power-electronics, all concerned with the manipulation of extreme frequencies to create ecliptic soundfields irradiated by starburst-black timbres. Inade, Anenzephalia, Con-Dom/The Grey Wolves and Satori - each of whom contribute a full CD to this elaborately-packaged (look for a 7"×11" book!) retrospective of a 1995 festival - differ in their styles and approaches. But they definitely share an aesthetic, instigating sensory intensification through electronic drones which disorient and, often, through sampled words which disturb. Pervasive Industrial Age hum and Throbbing Gristle-like sonics of unendurable portent emanate from Anenzephalia's hour-long set, building toward a nightmarish barrage of shivered declamatory voice and implosive feedback. Ambiguous politics (does "Crawl" ridicule or evangelise the detestable rhetoric of Holocaust denial?) and a penchant for such distressing incantations as "Victory Through Violence" make Con-Dom & The Grey Wolves' similar performance difficult to enjoy; in fairness, the sloganeering is so deliberately garbled and the recording quality so spotty that any intended message is lost in the medium. Satori's "Haut Bohrung, Parts I-IV" opts for a slow rush of scouring electronics and corrosive white-noise with a glorious climax of noise-scarred Gregorian chant; monochromatic, if never quite static or dull, but formidable and overwhelming at an uninterrupted fifty-two minutes. Easiest on the ears is Inade's CD, another dose of carcinogenic calmatives from the German duo responsible for the hermetic darkness of Aldebaran (Cold Spring) and "The Flood of the White Light" 10" (Malignant). Here they set the gaseous-state matter of Tangerine Dream's Atem adrift within a vacuum which allows for absolutely no melodic contamination. An extraordinary multidimensional fullness is actually achieved when any parts of the Tangerine Dream album and the Inade CD are played simultaneously (TD:2/I:4 and TD:3/I:6 are favourite combinations), though this reintroduction of melody and tonality into Inade's profound stellar sterility is probably wildly antithetical to the disk's intent.